• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.40 no.1 s.174
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• pp.39-50
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• 2007

This paper presents applications of the log-linear ROCOF(rate-of-occurrence-of-failure) and the Weibull ROCOF to model the failure rate of individual cast iron pipes in a water distribution system and provides a method of estimating the economically optimal replacement time of the pipes using the 'modified time-scale'. The performance of the two ROCOFs is examined using the maximized log-likelihood estimates of the ROCOFs for the two types of failure data: 'failure-time data' and 'failure-number data'. The optimal replacement time equations for the two models are developed by applying the 'modified time-scale' to ensure the numerical convergence of the estimated values of the model parameters. The methodology is applied to the case study water distribution cast iron pipes and it is found that the log-linear ROCOF has better modeling capability than the Weibull ROCOF when the 'failure-time data' is used. Furthermore, the 'failure-time data' is determined to be more appropriate for both ROCOFs compared to the 'failure-number data' in terms of the ROCOF modeling performances for the water mains under study, implying that recording each failure time results in better modeling of the failure rate than recording failure numbers in some time intervals.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.42 no.7
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• pp.525-535
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• 2009

In this paper a heuristic method for identifying individual pipes in water pipe networks to determine specific sections of the pipes that need to be replaced due to deterioration. An appropriate minimum pipe length is determined by selecting the pipe length that has the greatest variance of the average cumulative break number slopes among the various pipe lengths used. As a result, the minimum pipe length for the case study water network is determined as 4 m and a total of 39 individual pipe IDs are obtained. The economically optimal replacement times of the individual pipe IDs are estimated by using the threshold break rate of an individual pipe ID and the pipe break trends models for which the General Pipe Break Prediction Model(Park and Loganathan, 2002) that can incorporate the linear, exponential, and in-between of the linear and exponetial failure trends and the ROCOFs based on the modified time scale(Park et al., 2007) are used. The maximum log-likelihoods of the log-linear ROCOF and Weibull ROCOF estimated for the break data of a pipe are compared and the ROCOF that has a greater likelihood is selected for the pipe of interest. The effects of the social costs of a pipe break on the optimal replacement time are also discussed.